I wish I had something more inspiring to say than I did 6 weeks ago. I don’t. I am still burned out. I have succeeded at a couple small projects but they were maintenance (upgraded an out of data Drupal to Drupal 6) and not on the big list of major things that Need To Be Done ™.

It is alarming the extent to which I am motivated by crisis and change. There was a recent bit of drama that could have inspired some (more) public name calling and conflict but I just don’t think dealing with these situations in that way is the best strategy (for a non left position)… Because there are two things going on, one is exceedingly boring and irrelevant (a conflict between small-to-medium sized businesses) the other is deeply fascinating to me and worth talking about outside of the pinprick of this particular indignity.

Since the publication of SALA (Social Anarchism vs. Lifestyle Anarchism) there has been a tension (although one of several) in North American Anarchism. What is interesting about this tension is that the one side (the accused) have spent (hundreds of) thousands of words grappling with the implications, motivations, and philosophy of this book. Those who align themselves with its intent never defend it (per se) but instead evoke it like a glowing sword. Like a pistol at a fist fight. Believing that the mere utterance of the word “lifestylist” is enough to start, resolve and end any argument. North American’s are already impoverished: by an education woefully lacking in history or geographical context, by a near cellular level of acceptance of exchange relationships, and by our own geographical contradictions (being in a country that is comprised of at least 3 different cultural bodies).

I mention SALA not because I believe the text to be particularly important but the fact that there is a real conflict between those who share a lot of the same terminology in describing our desired world can’t be understated. For some this conflict boils down to serious disagreements about the strategy we should undertake, for others it is about a (set of) moral compulsion(s), and others about what form anarchist practice should take today. I take a softer (and harder) position. I care less about the particular articulation one chooses to make around their practice, desire, or strategy but much more about the religiousity (or ideological) one has around their choices. Consider this a bookmark to a larger discussion about this topic and enjoy this song (related).

Say what you must, do all you can,
Break all the fucking rules and
Go to Hell with Superman and
Die like a champion, yeah hey!

I still have 1000 ideas running through my mind but absolutely no energy to act on any of them. I have enough energy to exercise, get through my work day… and that’s about it. I am burned out. I am sick of this routine but have still not completed my tasks (even though they are arbitrary) here. Life while burned out, dancing in the husk of potential, the bitter liquid that kickstarts another day and the set of problems I have to attend to…

But I am still on the data flow. Here are a couple nice snapshots from today alone.

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

From NY Times: Sociology of a hipster

I’m not setting myself above the fray. I’m right here in the middle, reading comments as if listening in on a national party line (I experience a slight dislocation when I realize how few of you have ever listened in on a party line, or even know what one is). There are comments here are on all sorts of things: Politics, literature, movies, art, health, God, the universe.

From Roger Ebert’s Journal

I am also starting to think more seriously about a request that was made by a friend about an essay I should write. The topic is the decision making model used for LBC but more generally is the unanswered question about what are the different models that anarchist have at their disposal for decision making. I have direct experience with several of the models but want to sketch out the positions fairly and not just through the lens of my disillusionment. This will include consensus, spokes council, union of egos, charisma driven, etc…

This is all I have for now.

I haven’t updated in a while as I’ve been busy being unmotivated… and getting out the first issue of The Anvil! This link get’s you a free (but for the postage) copy of the paper. This link is to the editorial of the first issue. Here is a quote from the editorial that I’d like to expand on.

In our unreal world, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the invisible things that are easily confused with reality: fake controversies, confused priorities, hyperbolic rhetoric about inconsequential things. We become disengaged with the torrents that pass us by. Paper slows us down enough to engage in the ideas that we are talking about.

Many readers are likely to know that as much as I valorize print, in my daily life I also spend 12+ hours a day in front of a screen. My criticisms of the Internet generation are criticisms that I know all too well. They are criticisms of me and the person that I have become since I started spending all of my time in front of a screen. I spend my waking hours switching from fake controversy to stupid priorities pausing long enough to dissect something useful, if possible, out of the rhetoric on the screen.

I don’t sit in the sun for hours. I rarely spend more than 15 minutes a day reading a book that I can touch with my hands. I recently bought a kindle and am rereading old, readily available SF on it. I am a brain in a bottle, stacked in a row. Can you tell I’ve been working in the cubicle farm for too long?

Outside of the torrent of screen life is the pace of publishing. I love it. We tend to line our titles up for a once a year (hopefully twice next year) launch around the San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair in March. This means that we are discussing manuscripts with authors now to finish in the next two months, to finalize in December, layout in January, and print in February to have on hand in March. Compared to blog-o-reality where the couple dozen people who check this regularly get a chunk of my thoughts a couple of hours after I start to have this this cycle is excruciatingly slow. Many of the people in my daily data flow sincerely believe that this aspect of life (print) is worthless. They extract no value out of the slow moving, muddy stream. They live in the rush (and the push and the land that we stand on is ours), the data rush, the drama rush, and the rush of the gaze.

I’ll wrap up my thinking about The Anvil other than to ask interested writers of review essays to get in touch with us. We would like to publish you. Interested readers we would like you to consider subscribing to the paper. If you do you will be helping support the project and make it easier to go to print more often.

I have been experimenting a bit with barefoot walking (with minimalist shoes). While I can’t imagine walking around the city in them, when I am at home, or hiking I am entirely in love with them. I think that the arguments about shoes being casts for our feet and weakening/atrophying our foot and lower leg muscles is entirely on point.

I started dialing into this because I tore some ligament in my knee (probably the ACL) a couple of years ago and haven’t been able to run with traditional running shoes ever since. I can still do cardio in the gym (which is basically an exercise cast for your whole body), I can still do everyday activities (including walking) but as soon as I add the extra motion of running in a couple blocks I am done.

Running as been the one kind of exercising that I have ever loved and I mean love L-U-V. As a teenager I was part of the cross country team and got into the whole package. Long runs, country runs, the competition, the solitude, endorphins, the whole package appealed to me. That was 25 years ago. Now I sit in front of a screen, motionless but for my fingers. I debate whether to watch one more hour of a program rather than be in my body. I need to run.

For a couple weeks I tried to run barefoot. It was fucking fantastic. For a couple of the runs I was reminded of the endorphin rush I used to get back in the day. I was reminded that I actually have more going on that just being a brain-in-a-bottle… so of course I injured myself. It has been two weeks since then waiting for my foot to heal (no break, just something that feels like a bruise). I realize that my hope to jump up to 10 miles a week isn’t going to happen quickly. I am fragile and fat. This thing that I know is going to nourish me in exactly the way that I want to be nourished right now is just out of reach.

Couple that with the misery of a routine I am tired of and I am not in a great place right now. I am just watching the days go by… waiting.

Finally a third one from a friend in OR

ARAGORN! – Avatar of Clarity

As the crisis of industrial civilization intensifies and the Biosphere becomes ever more fragmented, it’s clearer and clearer that those resisting the death march of Empire could use some truly radical analysis. Personally, we feel the world could use more explicitly anarchist analysis of our collective plight, strategic anarchist analysis that seeks the broadest and deepest change possible, involving the largest numbers of individuals possible. Yet most contemporary anarchist “theorists” insist on being endlessly discursive, absurdly prolix, in love with tiddling academic ornamentation for the sake of it, arcane on the surface but mundane on the inside, and above all hyper-dull. One is often left with a strong puzzlement over who and what this smug literary tiddling is actually meant for!

Intellectuals have (or ought to have) an obligation to communicate clearly, or else they automatically become a closed system, creating ideas solelyfor each other; the sheer complexity of their thought results in deeply unattractive formulations of byzantine dimensions that resist simplification. Without “simplification” (an admittedly lazy word choice) anarchist and other subversive memes are only ever carried by a high-brow cultural elite. This is a matter of comprehensibility, and our use of the word “simplification” refers to a process more akin to distillation: for ideas to spread they must be framed in an accessible fashion!

If we’re dealing with empowerment, then ideas need to be stated clearly. It’s authoritarian at the very least to expect everybody who encounters anarchist propaganda to do their own self-financed course in obfuscatory French philosophers before being admitted to the fold. To remove subversive ideas from the control of the intelligentsia they must be made more comprehensible to a wider range of people, especially overworked wage-slaves who may well not be interested in grinding their way through sadistically dull, neurotically overwrought post-modern windbaggery. A great many contemporary anarchist writers actually disempower their readers due to the sheer obscurity of their thought!

Fortunately for us, this is where Aragorn! steps in. Waging a one-man war on vagueness and ambiguity, Aragorn! recognizes that whatever language constructs are most efficient at getting themselves copied will also be the most effective replicators of the anarchist meme. To this end, Aragorn! smites down the shadowy phantoms of ineffectual intellectual dialectical detritus with his fiery sword of clarity: employing a dazzling, but down-to-earth, writing style and a straightforward precision not seen in anarchist thought since Louis Ling, Aragorn! uses the visceral power of everyday speech to bypass the analytical defenses of the overeducated mind and send atavistic emotions surging through his readers.

In a stunningly illuminating prose that is neither circuitous nor self-indulgent-a prose that can best be described as elemental– Aragorn! reveals himself to be a sworn enemy of obfuscation and tedious, doctrinaire talk, unleashing word-combinations that strike not at the conceptual excesses of the post-modern intellect but at the very core of the human soul! This is not to say that Aragorn! attempts to speak in a “pseudo-populist” vocabulary or tones down the subtlety of his ideas for mass-market consumption, it’s just that he never leaves any room for misinterpretation and die-hard fans and casual readers alike always know exactly where he stands!

Well Aragorn!, by now , after the battering you’ve received this evening, I’m sure you could use a supportive, healing hug from someone. But unfortunately for you, Sunfrog doesn’t seem to be in attendance!

Here is a second roast contributed by John Zerzan from Eugene Oregon

Aragorn! Subversive Trickster or Postmodern Confusionist?

Who is this larger (much larger) than life figure? How should we appreciate and applaud his bizarre term of confounding us? He who laughs at such pedestrian notions as commonly accepted definitions, historical fact, and consistent vision––what manner of beast is this?

Did he receive his wound to the chest from actual skinheads in Sacramento—or was this a decentered bit of text about a virtual “Sacramento?” His manifest energy—perhaps the output of theory graduate students in league with his merry deconstruction of reality?

And what manner of man, after all, is he who attracts two women who together, arrange his birthday roast?

His nihilism may be elusive, if not elliptical, but AK Press, NEFAC, and other assorted lefty losers are paying the price.

All hail to our smiling conundrum, and welcome all interpreters, floating signifiers, and guides to the perplexed!

JZ

With all the writing I’ve been doing about Letters of Insurgents the past few months I haven’t shared what is sharable about the roast that happened for my 40th birthday. I will start with an entry from my friend Artnoose. She is about to start work on a major tattoo for me so I will not say anything curt about her entry (which was read in absentia since she lives in Pittsburgh).

Here I am, roasting from a safe distance. And I know what you’re saying— “Artnoose? But she’s a cream puff! She’s way too nice to write a suitably scathing roast.”

And you’re right. I am too nice. No reason to fault Aragorn! for that, though. He did his best.

I met Aragorn!at the Burley House in San Diego around 1992, or maybe the year before. Boy was he a jerk back then. And me? I was busy having my mind blown by the collective house situation, especially— and get this— house meetings! I was totally enamored with them.

At the time Aragorn! was playing computer games (Wolfenstein?) all the time and sharing a bedroom with a few people who as far as I could tell he wasn’t related to or sleeping with. That was also mind-blowing.

Also as far as I could tell, Aragorn! could win any argument, and even back then, I was never sure if this was a positive thing or not.

Still, I observed his argumentation style, even when I seemed asleep on the couch while he and my boyfriend at the time got into debates late into the night. I want to add a few more things about this time in history before jumping ahead. One is that Aragorn! and Chuck were the first people I met who had septum piercings. The other is that Aragorn!’s gaming name was Chomsky, and I think that my questioning of this name I-had-never-heard-before spawned a verbal introduction to anarchism.

In 1993 I got my septum pierced, moved to the Bay Area, made a trek to Bound Together to purchase Living My Life, and began calling myself an anarchist. I mention this because I suspect that Aragorn! was probably the unwitting focus of this turn. I didn’t see him again until I think 1995, when I almost literally ran into him in the hallway at the 20th Street House, where I was dating one of the residents. We exchanged hellos, he didn’t remember my name, and after a few moments of silence, he said, “Well, no reason for us all to stand here being uncomfortable,” and left.

I probably saw Aragorn! off and on for a few years after that (with him forgetting my name consistently), during which time I had begun attending the reading group at the Long Haul. The debate education that had begun at the Burley House continued as I watched Lawrence battle friends, foes, and ideologies every Tuesday night for years.
At some point a new influx of people began attending the reading group, and Aragorn! was one of them. It was a turning point for the reading group but also my own life as well, as the greater circle of friends around these new people were to become my close friend base.

How this happened was through a difficult situation I found myself in. I was scared and I didn’t feel like I was getting support from the people around me. Aragorn! stepped in to lend a hand, and the thing that I always remember is that he didn’t have to. He made the choice. Other people stepped in too, and it changed the way I thought about friends, even though recent events might suggest otherwise. A true helping hand is one that’s extended without being forced, and it’s unfortunately rare.

Aragorn!was pretty solidly in my life from then on, and I can’t count how many times I’ve had to defend my friendship with him. We’ve also gotten into some rows ourselves, about who I date, how much I kiss people in public, the proper format to submit graphic design to a letterpress printer, and ineffective approaches to storming into virtual buildings armed to the hilt. This last bit is most dramatically illustrated in the moment when during an epic game of Counterstrike I kept getting picked off (probably by Mike K.) in the first few seconds of every round, and Aragorn! yelled out, “Artnoose! Could you pleeeeeease try to not be so fucking USELESS?!” I think I stormed out, but years later I got major cred on tour because there’s that Network of Terror song “Debacle at the LAN Party” and I could actually say that I had been an instrumental player at one.

So there you have it. Later I moved in, shit went crazy, I drew a comic zine about it, and eventually I left town. I still consider Aragorn! one of my best friends, even though we hardly ever see each other. If nothing else, I have a septum ring and Letters of Insurgents to thank him for. Oh, and a few dozen unfinished Kriegspiel boards. Maybe LBC will put them on sale or something…}

Most of my associates have not been following this project over the summer. I have been excited about taking on the intensity of writing (and reading) every week but have done it largely alone. The web site hasn’t been that active. Comments on my blog have been nearly non-existent. Even the weekly study group at the center of my social life is reading this book without me (as my job has interfered with my ability to be with the group). I have even avoided, by and large, reading the contributions by Artnoose and others out of concern of repeating points, losing focus, or being responsive rather than proactive in sharing my thoughts. I approached this 10 (12) week project much as I approached the book itself, alone.

People who live their lives in close proximity to books, through books, against and for books, are often alone, lonely people. You can often tell us by our improper pronunciation of terms we have only ever read, our vocabulary that includes more words than the average 15,000 and uses colloquial terms as readily as modern. We also exhibit the alarming characteristic of having deep relationships with the books we read. Often closer than with people, even when we have access to them. This trait can be seen in embryonic form in the near cos-play of young readers of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings novels where the richness of the books universe exceeds the suburban cultural poverty of most of its readers. In adult form I work with a woman whose job title is security guard but who in fact spends every day embedded in books–barely interested enough in the affairs of man to lift her head to look at the bank of screens in front of her.

As it turns out I have to fight to not join her in a better world right now.

This novel was part of my process of expelling myself from the gravitational force of fantasy. This was not because I identified so closely with the characters. This reading has really cured me of identification (as I expand on in my comments on letter 7) with the characters, but because the ideas within the novel pushed me out of pages of books. Life is not in there but out here. I still have great love for books and even position them at the center of my affairs but they comprise the set of simple machines from which to build rather than the artifice themselves.

This book, Letters of Insurgents, it turns out, knocked down the piles of books that would have otherwise been the only way that you and I were able to communicate.

Sexuality

The social circles that radicals live in, and I speak largely of post-AIDS crisis radicals in North America (PACR) (which are the only ones I really know), have a tortured relationship with sex, sexuality, sexual relationships, etc. One of the many ways in which Letters of Insurgents serves as a bottle in the ocean from one side of a divide to another is regarding its discussion of sex–particularly taboo sex. Letters of Insurgents‘s entire arena of interest, regarding sex, seems orthogonal to the experience of most everyone I know.

On glancing at the other posts on the book (most of which are written by women) I notice a lot of attention has been given to this topic and this theme in the book. Completely related to the first point I make regarding sexuality in radical circles is the impossibility of me even getting into this issue. I am torn between wanting to speak to it (the topic), against it (the taboo of male participation in the discussion), about my own experiences, and to speak in such a way as to guard myself. Rich material indeed. Let’s at least explore why I view PACR as having a tortured relationship with sex.

I am in the first (and only) wave of children of the free love movement. My parents loved (and had sex) wildly. In point of fact this was the principle way they attempted to break with normal (normative) society . My childhood was around sex. Humans having it near me. Breaking up because of it. Having medical procedures as a result of it. Sex, sex, sex filled their shallow lives with the belief that they were tearing down old values and actually doing something which they weren’t doing at all.

Couple this with the cultural values of Native America. I am not going to dwell long here but it is worth mentioning that modesty has a high value in Native culture and that my time in the Seventies were filled with complications resulting from a modest culture abutting one that prioritized a kind of freedom that was neither free nor modest.

Again, I want to dance along my personal time line so as to speak to the taboos of the book (so forgive me for a break that might feel like a disconnect). Here is a block of lyrics from a band from the Eighties that talked about sex in a way that was compelling to me then… and now.

Oh, but don’t mention love
I’d hate the pain of the strain all over again
A rush and a push and the land that
We stand on is ours

The Smiths – A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours

Perhaps I am straining credibility but the connection seems apparent to me that there is a connection, not a causal, or direct connection, but a connection to a certain kind of industrialized libidinal activity and industrial conflict. Industrial conflict is the utter interconnection between tools and people, in the parlance of this book, in other words, it is how civilization happens. Back to the novel.

I don’t actually find the specific crisis of child sexuality to be a compelling theme in the novel. I believe that many kinds of situations could bring up the explosion that Yarostan inflicts upon his family and that forbidden sex makes the issue titillating but not compelling. I think the same, or similar, pressure was put on Jasna in the final chapter to far greater effect. The question of crisis, what brings iton, how each of us will deal with it when it comes, is exceedingly important. The book demonstrates, through several examples, a point that I find disconcerting in our broader culture and have yet to find my way around. In times of crisis between people who you know, people you have face-to-face relationships with, the most likely outcome is fracture, pain, and cleavage. Because, in North America, political life is so short (between the age of 18 and 25 and then never again) there is very little experience with the constellation of feelings around crisis. Instead life’s crisis is only considered part of family life and that cultural responses are the only ones experimented with.

To put this point another way, when you live in a culture that valorizes effectiveness it is not a surprise that people see taboos as nothing but distracting wastes of time that should be handled violently, sex as for procreation (especially after the AIDS crisis), and winning as far more important than how one wins.

On the one hand Mirna and Yara’s setup of Yarostan exposes his hang ups and lack of ability to handle a crisis appropriately, on the other their setup of Titus and Jasna determined the future of their relationship and demonstrated that impacting another person’s life is much easier than one would believe. The force that it takes to push others around and stand on their land is easier than we may believe and can often be confused for something we would do as an act of love or passion.

Coherence

One of the few points of constructive criticism that I receive time and time again is that I expose interesting ideas in a lot of my writing but never follow them up. I make half my point and leave the rest to die on the vine. This is by design, and perhaps may never change. I am sensitive to an increasing problem in modern discourse that I feel like I have been guilty of but want to try to parse a little bit here. The problem with much of modern discourse is that people don’t actually want to say something that they can be held accountable to later. For anarchists there are obvious problems where one day you may argue for class struggle as the only way in which society can be transformed and then later decide that working with small groups is the only way to be effective in social transformation. By making the simple, strong point earlier you limit your future ability to sound like you know what you are talking about. It makes more sense to bifurcate and hedge, imply and infer, rather than to state smaller points emphatically and accept that former positions are wrong.

To take a more recent example, in the prior section of this little piece of writing it could be read into what I am saying that a certain approach to fucking is tantamount to, or at the very least the antecedent, to genocide. This isn’t the kind of thing I would actually say with much conviction but isn’t an unfriendly turn of my phrase. Just one I wouldn’t use. As a result of not saying things in such a clear, provocative way I am accused of being unclear. This may be the case but is also not the case. Alongside the thread in which I placed connecting sex and booted feet on other peoples land is one about the futility of winning when it fractures a person’s life, the utility of sex as procreation in the shadow of taboo, and several others. When you speak in clear declarative statements you make simple points clearly and dishonor others. As a writer I want to speak to all of these things and not just the crassest of my own points (as firmly as I may believe them).

This confluence between simplicity and coherence can be stacked on the kindling of the irrelevance of radicals in North America. We seem neither visionary nor clear enough to win. Our strategy isn’t possible enough to get behind or impossible enough to embrace anyway. We make a kind of sense but only if one chooses to separate themselves from everything they know, every value that shapes their understanding of the world, every friendship they made till now. There are no surprises in the people who pass right through these crazy ideas and dreams.

And yet we still have them and for those of us stubborn enough to stand still, enjoy the time we have with shooting stars.

Letters of Insurgents is not a book about winners. The victories that occur are quiet victories that make a different kind of sense to those of us who have made the cognitive break from straight society. I imagine others can get a lot of things out of the book but it is a book targeted straight at the heart of a loser like me. I will never be able to put my ideas about how to live into practice in anything other than the most fleeting of moments and spaces. I will never turn back the tanks, hang the bureaucrats, destroy the interstates, erase the bombs and guns of states, or live in a real community that is free from property and violence. Letters of Insurgents made a convincing argument that this was the case and made just as convincing of an argument that I needed to pull my head out of my books and try anyway.

I have been humbled to be a part of this project and to have at least a few other people interested in my thoughts on this book and its impact on me. Hopefully you will share something you love with me next time.

This chapter featured a few strong minor characters. Three archetypal characters dominate letter 9 and as archetypes I have known, or been, each of them. Here are a few of our stories.

Daman – The perfect student-teacher turned ideological director.

He apparently decided that the only meaningful human activity was the total destruction of the capitalist class in all its manifestations, in the colonies as well as the ghettos. That attitude coincided perfectly with our tendency’s political program…

Perhaps this is a sign of my generation but I have known at least a dozen people who approximate the Daman of this story. I’d like to believe the characteristics were less prevalent in another time but the combination of this period of political ineffectiveness (especially from a radical perspective), the existential confusion people have between sub-culture and reality, and the popularity of certain sets of ideas (Postmodernism, the Situationists, Identity Politics) has made this type all-too-common. Take a boy whose first steps into the world are buttressed with liberal doses of books and now the Internet, who comes from enough privilege to not have to doubt their secondary education, and who is brave enough to be in the club when the fights break out but has no reason to fight themselves and fuck, maybe I’m being too conservative by saying I’ve met a dozen Daman’s. I’ve met hundreds.

But I have stopped becoming close to them. Not because they always disappoint. I am no longer such a purist that I require a lack of disappointment to be friends with someone. I am just less interested in mentoring them. I am happy to meet Daman once he has established himself, but I will not be part of creating another one. They just exhaust me now and odds are about equal that they go one way or another.

The Daman I was closest to just faded out of my life. I guess he got caught on the other side of a burning bridge of mine. I heard later he went from being awkward and pudgy to being quite a looker and a bit of a Lothario. Went to grad school. Swam around in precarious gigs for a couple years and then fell off of peoples radar. I guess he never found a Luisa to make him complete.

Alec – dope dealer who died in battle

During his last weeks here he’d spend hours pacing. He was like a caged animal. He said all he wanted was to help make a revolution, with his gun in his hand, and not to talk about it or read about it or support it at rallies or demonstrations. He apparently met people with similar views, and he started going off to political meetings. One day he simply failed to return. I made no attempt to find him; we were free individuals.

I am including a eulogy I wrote for the Alec in my life

Dear Alec,

We never had a habit of writing letters. I know I was just as much to blame for that since I am just as capable of putting pen to paper, or fingers to the keyboard, as you are. Or were. I write you this last letter to remind the both of us where we were when you left, and to understand why you went without me.

When I first entered your social circle I was only 15. You already had a group of ‘rebels’ who you hung out with, but you all were my first. In hindsight it was amazing what a happy group of people it was given the times in our life, and the shit from which we were emerging, but so it was. Most every trope from the coming-of-age movie we all spectacularly see our lives as being were represented in that group. There was the brooding future Nazi who drove us all around. The more generous than you could imagine fat guy was there. There was the troublemaker (that was you, of course), the good kids who didn’t belong with us, the quiet nerdy guy who exposed us to the culture we were entering and the boys who were cuter than wise (that was most of us). I guess I wasn’t as definable at that time in my life, as I was just figuring out where I stood. But, as you know, I had lots of secrets and was pretty good at keeping them to myself.

Other people’s secrets… That was another story.

The experiences that we had are some of the most memorable of that time in my life for me, but your social group became only a part of my social life. You all lived, seemingly, a bit too far away from me, and once the scene had settled into a fixed location I was focused on being there, so that I wouldn’t miss anything. It’s so much easier and more difficult for kids in our town today. Every time I go back I crack up at how much better dressed the ‘rebellious’ kids are. Maybe its just because there is more money, more Internet, more retail, but it also seems like a veneer covering an essential vapidity in what being a misfit is all about today.

We would have had a blast making fun of them, if we were only the right age for it today.

There is a prime thing I take from our relationship that I have never found again. We were both good natured and totally spiteful. It kind of makes me think of sarcasm as being a lost art or something, and it is, but fuck if I don’t have to pad about everything I say nowadays with caveats and apologies just so all the well adjusted people around me don’t get their fucking pants in a bind. Whatever. We each had our own styles of the put down too. That was always a blast. You tended to go for the direct insult tempered with an escape hatch if the victim wanted to take it. You were more directly confrontational than I was. My insults always seemed innocuous, but spoke more deeply to the inadequacies of the target. Usually people missed what I was trying to say until a bit later, but I gave less room for escape. As I am sure you remember, I am much better at that now. That is the one partnership that we had that I will never replace, we were the best tag-team humiliators I have ever met.

But your trajectory through our teens ended up being a bit lower of an arc than mine. I guess that says something about potential, since you have always been seen as having more, but you were always more fully committed to fittering it away. Our one major split came when you started to get more and more involved in drugs and, like with everything else you engage in, you started to gain a reputation for being the biggest bad-ass of drug taking. Great achievement in hindsight, eh? Anyway we were at a part at the Domicile and you had done some ungodly amount of coke and was being very dramatic about it all. I’ll speak to your man drama later, but you were in full effect that night. You pulled out some box-cutter blade and slashed the hell out of your arm. I think it was motivated by removing the tattoo on your arm…

I’ll always remember that first tattoo. In the end you had it covered and ended up with a bit more of a stylish ‘back alley crew’ montage of tattoo’s but your first one, which you got on your 16th birthday and came over to my place right after, was totally fucking ridiculous. Obviously you were entranced by the flash on the biker shop’s wall so you must have picked a #47 or some such, since it was a skull and kind of tough or whatever, but what you ended up getting was what looked like a skull eating spaghetti. It was fucking hysterical, you were the first one of us to make the jump to permanent ink and it was the silliest thing we had ever seen. I even recall, for the first couple of months, you ripping the sleeves off of all your t-shirts to make sure that everyone saw the damn thing on your arm only stopping when you couldn’t stand us all making so much fun of you.

…so you cut your arm in a highly public attempt to cut the stupid tattoo off of your arm. Of course you cut too deep. Of course you could only manage one cut out of the 4-5 that you would need. But you cut pretty fucking deep into your arm, enough so that the bleeding would not stop, which didn’t stop you from staggering around the place like a drunken sailor spraying blood and your issues all over the place, not accepting help from anyone, not settling down (as you were obviously high as a kite and in quite a bit of pain), forcing the confrontation to either stop your shit or we were calling an ambulance.

I didn’t really hang out with you for years after that phase. I moved away, you spent some time in jail, and we both choose our paths.

When we saw each other again it was as if no time had passed. Our partnership was intact with the added bonus that we both had thick enough skins to included each other in our sights. We had much to account for it seems as we each went on and on about the others promiscuity and lack of seriousness but we each needed to hear it. We both had not been criticized half as much as we should have been by loving people. It was too easy to get defensive when the only barbs thrown your was are by the incompetent, the hateful and the people passing through.

But there still was distance. I lived over here, you stayed there, and we were all-to-human. You filled your life with martial arts and your uncritical admirers I with our (priorly) shared counter-culture and then radical politics. This meant that every time we would spend time together we would shake things up, knock the dust off of each others wit and sharpen our tongues, but without presence we stopped growing together. I think we both grudgingly accepted this.

What I cannot accept, and only see now that it is too late, is how much you needed the only thing I was unquestioningly better at than you. You needed a critical friend who wasn’t afraid of you, worshiped you, or wasn’t sleeping with you. At some point something changed, and I would have seen it, but I was there only en absentia, and too much time passed. One time I visited and your life was stumbling along, partial and in the shadow of your potential but not entirely awry. The next time I came you were gone. By your own hand and in your uniquely dramatic style.

What we all expected when you were a teenager you only accomplished 15 years later, surprising us with your patience but not your rashness. You always had to tell your stories of whoa, you had to make sure of your legacy. I remember one time when you had gotten into a fight, was it with metal heads?, you had been beaten pretty badly. They had broken your nose at the very least, which was no amazing feat as you had a formidable proboscis, but the blood was everywhere. You were wearing a white t-shirt covered in it, and it was only after hours of prodding, and a considerable amount of female attention that you cleaned yourself up and allowed the center of attention to move off of you.

This I cede to you lovingly. You were at your best when you were at the center. You weren’t the clown, like I am, you weren’t arrogant about it, but your brilliant potential was enough to make everyone smile. You weren’t an affectionate friend, but I never doubted your loyalty to us. You didn’t become all that would have wished for you, and I imagine you knew this, but you were still twice the person of almost anyone else I have ever met. Our friendship, and my understanding, goes with you to where you have gone.

This circle is closed.

Ted – The Western ideal: Scientist, human, friend

“This is Ted, the printer,”

I am not going to use this as opportunity to talk about my utter revulsion at the Western man. He is a doomed creature that I can’t summon up enough energy to despise today. I have already given him too much time. I am trying to move on.

In that spirit I have gained a respect for the competence of Ted. In our time of social, organizational, structural ineptitude Ted can do something. Call it printing, programming, fixing bikes or cars we have so far to go that just having skills, a skill, is something. If only Ted didn’t get chased out of every group, meeting, or social circle for not being Daman or Alec we might turn something into something real.

This circle is closed and we are on the outside of it.

This time around I am not going to start with the first part of my notes (which I do chronologically) and end with the final notes but reverse my order. As a result of going A->Z I’ve probably given a lot more attention to Yarostan’s letters rather than Sophia’s.

Around the time I was learning from Letters of Insurgents I was reading a lot of other things. For around an 8 month period when I was absorbing the book I was reading about a book every day. I was working in a graveyard job and living my van in Ann Arbor. I was using this as an opportunity to raid bookstores in the area, the U of M library in general, and, in particular, the Labadie collection. This was my chance to hold on the original set of SI Journal and to really dig deep into the material that has shaped my life since. I’ll probably never have another intellectual period in my life as intense as this. The problem with absorbing material in an isolated vacuum (which is what I was in at that time) is that some things you get right, some things you get wrong. I enjoyed the incredible volume of material I was consuming. Later I learned that the mixture of science fiction, post-structural classics, and everything available in English from “the milieu” would garner me a decade of being called incoherent, dense, and postmodernist.

“Because I was a schizophrenic already then!” Sabina exclaims. “Or maybe that was when my schizophrenia began. I applauded because Jan had thrown a wrench into Luisa’s and Zabran’s machinery, and also because what he said made a lot of sense to me, and still does. I even understood some of the implications of what he said. During the days that followed he told me that as a boy he had lived among streams, forests and fields and had loved to explore their secrets; ever since he’d become a worker he’d been reduced to an appendage of a machine.

– Sophia 8

I am fascinated by mental illness. I’ve been around pleny of people who self-identified as having some sort of mental illness and several of my teenage friends were medicated. It’s always been a set of problems I’ve watched from a far. Even when I was digging the deepest into my own abuse history and personal suffering the way in which it manifested itself always looked like the typical self-hobbling and lack of direction that most teenagers suffer from. It did not look like Aragorn! == crazy. I didn’t quite understand how other people, people who I felt I was a lot like and who I understood pretty well experienced their pain in such different ways than me.

Reading Foucault was a lot of help. I get the idea that mental illness is socially constructed like the other invisibile tyrants of daily life. The idea that illness exists in a context¹ makes sense to me and represents the kind of problematic² that I can imagine enjoying in a time when there are no bills to pay, a world collapsing, and unchecked authoritarians running amok. I consider this analysis as useful as the other lever ideologies like Marxism, Anarchism, et al. True but not a great deal of help in helping me come to terms with survival, self possession and an action plan.

Here “Anti-Oedipus” was instrumental. I like Delueze as an author outside of this text but the exploration that this book does around schizophrenia helped me a great deal in thinking about life in misery. The pressures of life are real. They press upon us. There are no real ways to relieve this pressure, only ways to cope with it. For me I put all the things in my life that press upon me and I put them into boxes. I establish a great deal of time coming up with rules around each box. I keep tools separate from people. Work away from projects that have meaning to me. I am a functioning schizophrenic, but it is not an illness, it is survival by other means.

There was never any reason to repress anything I was doing. I’ve never been free. Free human beings can’t be repressed; they have to be destroyed.

The harshest criticism of this book is of me and those around me. We have devoted ourselves to a mythology. To revolution. To destroying all the things that destroy us. To a life long pursuit of knowledge and context and meaning. In this struggle we have not become free human beings. Or perhaps we have been free and have been destroyed. In our shattered state we have to feel our way along. We understand complexity and it hasn’t saved us. It has made us observers of life and inept at free action. The falsehood of the theory vs action critique isn’t that action (or theory) is better but that neither are sufficient.

I don’t agree with your friend Clesec’s suggestion that nothing at all changes when the workers themselves take charge of the existing production apparatus. But I do agree that such an act does not create a new form of human activity, since what is appropriated is precisely the old activity, the existing world. And this existing world is not a field for the realization of projects, but a negation of the very possibility of projects. It is not this activity, even if appropriated and managed by us, that we’re glimpsing on the horizon because it is at the very center of our present lives. It is what surrounds us now, what we inherited. It wasn’t projected by us but by the history of capital.

1. The context of social pressure to be normal, Western medicines biases, and the social scene around the identity of mental illness.
2. I can’t stand the word problematic. The problematic of problematic is pretty fucking problematic.